As the Internet has become increasingly popular, online social networks are becoming an important and pervasive mechanism for communication, entertainment, and profession and social networking. Some online social networks use digital advertisements to meet or defray the costs of hosting. Some of the advertisements, however, are directed to products, which may not be of interest to many people using an online social network for the purposes described above.
Also, the ability of social network members to highlight themselves or their messages may be limited to sending out messages to a large group of members that may or may not be interested in the messages.